Enhancing Our Environmental Peacebuilding Practice

Date & Time
Jun 16, 2026 | 13.30 - 15.00

Participants
S. Ama Wray, University of California Irvine (United States)
Stephanie Martinez, University of California Irvine (United States)

Enhancing Our Environmental Peacebuilding Practice demands creativity and attentiveness to diverse perspectives, and stands much to learn by engaging with movement and dance. In a workshop on “Enhancing Our Environmental Peacebuilding Practice,” Dr. S. Ama Wray will facilitate conference attendees in a movement session that encourages participants to contemplate the foundations of life which requires movement. In this case movement and music serve as mediums to rebuild connections with their bodily-selves to bring sensory awareness and interconnection with others and their surroundings, which are also not static. Throughout the event, the participants will build a foundational communication network through dynamic rhythm to understand new ways in which they can harness their own embodied creativity to become deeper listeners and translational communicators as they operate within sensitive spaces of environmental deliberation. This procedural experience intertwines iterative feedback shared between participants, preceded by a pre-brief and a final debrief. These reflective opportunities offer a novel way to share insights as well as challenges they encounter during the interactions; it is posited that there will be analogous connections with their work. The session will be led by Dr. S. Ama Wray, Professor of Dance at the University of California, Irvine, and creator of Embodiology®, a systems thinking approach to generating creativity, structured by indigenous knowledge. She will be assisted by UC Irvine PhD Candidate in Social Ecology - looking at environmental policies and plural knowledges, Stephanie Martinez.